Articles

Welcome to the New CarloParlanti.it

In September 2005 a group of volunteers, who called himself "the girls of the blog", armed himself with FrontPage (and patience) and drew the first skeleton of this site dedicated to the Kafkaesque history of the Italian manager Carlo Parlanti, convicted in the county of Ventura in California as a result of false accusations and the use of fraudulent certificates and documentation.

As the name suggests, this group of volunteers had already edited a blog dedicated to this latest example of American injustice, but now the commitment was becoming more intense. Soon all this effort will give light to the non-governamental organization Prisoners of Silence which continues today to address specifically the defence of the human rights of Italians held abroad.

In April 2006, after the shocking sentence for Parlanti to nine years in prison for things that never even happened, they added another site dedicated this time to host and make public all the documentation of this trial-farce. The new document repository was called The People vs. Carlo Parlanti, taking inspiration from the typical formula used in American trials. Carlo had never been in prison and, according to the laws of California, he should at least have received the minimum sentence... Instead Judge James T. Cloninger, at the request of the Attorney Gilbert Romero, gave him the maximum sentence just to punish the arrogance with which he was highlighting the corruption of the Californian judicial system.

Carlo is back among us since February 15th, 2012 and, of course, he dedicated himself immediately to begin new legal battles against all the crimes committed during his persecution, but he also begun to study to recover the eight years of technological development that were stolen from him by the California justice. He first built the website of the International Association Victims of Judicial Errors, chaired by the attorney Luciano Faraon who is also the lawyer who is following the complaints mentioned above, then he renewed the site of Prisoners of Silence to better match the high moral and social commitment of this NGO.

Now it's finally time to rebuild also the site dedicated to him and to raise awareness of the crimes committed by Rebecca McKay White (the woman who has invented a rape that never happened), by doctors who signed fraudulent certificates for her and by the Ventura District Attorney and Police who concealed these crimes, probably to hide their incompetence... even at the cost of the life of an innocent.

A first attempt at rebuilding it happened in July 2011, when an attempt was made to migrate the site to a CMS platform (Content Management System) to ease maintenance and update of the site contents.

CMS platforms like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress allow you to separate the design and technical management of a site from the management of its contents. This increases the productivity of the authors and should, at least in theory, reduce the headaches. Unfortunately, the implementation of this type of software presents a "start up" complexity that makes them difficult to install for technically unskilled users. So it takes a geek who implements them and then everything becomes easier.

Luckily geeks are not lacking and Carlo, together with his brother Micha, will show us what he is capable of!

For this project they have designed from scratch templates and various plugins Joomla! making CarloParlanti.it a unique site (modern as well as functional).

But let's leave them the word to talk a little bit more about this template, Joomla and their commitment to the world of CMS:

Carlo

Already in 2003, during my adventure in the field of hotel reservations along with my colleagues/friends of BISCA, I realized the need to adopt some content management system to tame the amount of information that we had to manage (at the maximum of its expansion BISCA ran about 1,600 web sites each of which offered reservations for thousands of properties).

At that time, I wrote a CMS that we baptized DynaHTML and used MySQL, PHP and Smarty to generate literally thousands of sites and millions of pages on demand with virtually zero maintenance. You can imagine how eagerly, after the technological gap of 8 years stolen from me buy the judicial lynching I suffered in Ventura County, I have adopted the now omni-present Open Source CMS systems like Joomla, WordPress or Drupal.

Our favorite CMS is definitely Joomla, although together with Pubblica X Me we have made sites using other CMS, maybe less functional but perhaps because of this easier. We realized quickly that many of the templates available for Joomla (or themes for WordPress) are often designed with little attention to the needs of multilingual sites and even less attention to detail and flexibility.

It was because of these limitations that we quickly started designing templates for our sites; the first ever has been PXM_Simple, developed with the occasion of the restoration of the site of Prisoners of Silence. But the site entirely dedicated to my distressing and tragic persecution in the land of the free and home of the brave I had to design something less simple.

This is how PXM_Desktop was born; it has been adopted also for our portfolio site Pubblica X Me: a fully multi-lingual template with incredible functionalities. Just to mention a few:

choice between fixed or fluid canvas;

customizable logo;

really multi-language (motto, descriptions, modules, Google IDs);

3 different themes for modules, colors and fonts for a total of 9 different turnkey styles;

Choice between fixed or fluid canvas

The size of the canvas of this template (the portion with content in the browser window) can change from fixed-width (the most common trend nowadays) to fluid at the change of a parameter. It's as simple as specifying the width in pixels (eg 1024px) or as a percentage (eg 90%) to change from one mode to another.

Customizable logo

It's possible to quickly change the header of the website by selecting an image, updating the name of the site and entering a description, all these components can be aligned as desired and descriptions may change with the language. And if this is too simple of a head it can be replaced completely with a custom HTML module that best suits your needs.

Really mylti-language (motto, descriptions, modules, Google IDs)

Many templates forget to take proper account of the needs of multilunguage sites... PXM_Desktop is not one of them and all the text strings that can vary with the language have been coded in the appropriate language files for Joomla! This way, they will change with the language of your choice, and you can also edit them using the language override function. In addition, as you will see later, many modules of Joomla! have been fixed to take into account the needs of multilingual sites (even the Google Translate and Analytics IDs are handled this way so that they can change according to the domain or language).

3 different themes for modules, colors and fonts for a total of 9 different turnkey styles

Instead of forcing you to accept the default CSS style, PXM_Desktop leaves you the option of choosing between three styles for 3 areas: a total of nine possible combinations of styles. The CSS of the template are in fact separate CSS files dedicated to the edges of the modules (chrome), to the colors and fonts; for each of these areas it is possible to choose one of three different styles. And if that is not enough check out below:

Custom CSS in parameters

Very often there are conflicts between Joomla!'s CSS, those of the template in use and those of modules and plugins used. To solve this common problem, PXM_Desktop gives you the possibility to add CSS code directly into the template parameters; this CSS is loaded last and, having precedence over the others, it becomes the perfect spot to solve conflicts. Of course you can also use it simply to customize some of the styles of Joomla, the template or components/plugins in use.

Ready for Google Translate

In order to facilitate the adoption of the automatic Google translation feature, the template PXM_Desktop implements it by default: all you need to do is change a text string in the language override function and assign your Google Translate ID. Of course, if the site is multilingual, you can specify different IDs for different domains and languages.

Ready for Google Analytics

In order to facilitate the adoption of the functionality to collect statistics from Google, the template PXM_Desktop implements it by default: all you need to do is change a text string in the language override function and assign your Google Analytics ID. Of course, if the site is multilingual, you can specify different IDs for different domains and languages thus keeping separate their statistics.

Real vertical arrangment in Blogs

Although Joomla! orders correctly the articles in the vertical version of the Blog pages, it has some issues in the management of the spaces between the items themselves. Compare the two examples below:

Article 1

Article 3

Article 5

Article 2

Article 4

Article 6

the above is an example of the typical vertical organization of items in a Joomla! Blog page while below you can see the vertical organization of PXM_Desktop.

Article 1

Article 2

Article 3

Article 4

Article 5

Article 6

Accordion effect for articles introductions

Blog pages of the template PXM_Desktop are designed to allow accordion effect of the full article text. If you click on the article title you will be taken to the corresponding page, but if you click on the button Read more the full text unrolls down.

Article introductory text

(if set to be hidden in the full text, scrolls upwards before the full article is revealed)

Read more/close button

Article full text

(scrolls down when one clicks on Read more and up when one clicks on Close)

Obviously if the introductory text has been set to be hidden and not displayed with the rest of the article, it will move up before the full article is shown.

You can turn off this effect in the parameters of the template and let the button Read more link to the item page; but you can also enter pxm_accordion or pxm_no_accordion in the field Reference key of theDisplay options section of the Article's parameters to change the default behavior for a single item. This can be useful when the graphic content of an article doesn't work well with the accordion effect, or if you want to use it only for a few items.

3 different modules chromes: no div, single or double div

By default PXM_Desktop creates modules surrounded by a div with class moduletable like in the following example:

div class="moduletable"

Module's title

Menu item 1

Menu item 2

Menu item 3

If you have special needs you can ask the template to avoid surrounding a module with a div using the Advanced options and specifying the CSS class suffix pxm_div0:

no div

Module's title

Menu item 1

Menu item 2

Menu item 3

In a similar way you can ask the template to surround a module with two divs (useful for special CSS border effects) using the Advanced options of the module and specifying the CSS class suffix pxm_div2:

div class="moduletable"

div class="moduleinner"

Module's title

Menu item 1

Menu item 2

Menu item 3

3 menu effects in modules: tabs, opened, closed

The Advanced options of a module and the field CSS class suffix can be used also to ask PXM_Desktop to apply 3 different menu effects.

If you specify pxm_opened or pxm_closed it will add, to the right of the menu title, a - or + button and the menu will appear opened or closed; obviously if you click the button the menu will close or open and the button will change into its opposite.

If you specify pxm_tabbedX (where X is a number between 0 and 9) in the field CSS class of one or more menu modules, PXM_Desktop will group them and will create a typical tabbed menu providing a huge space saving and ease of navigation.

Content plugins applicable to modules

If you specify pxm_plugins in the field CSS class of one or more modules, PXM_Desktop will apply all content plugins to the content of these modules. So if you have used some custom HTML modules and relied on some content plugin like {plugin}instructions{/plugin} everything will work exactly as if the code was in a main content area.

com_contact: the Joomla! contact components displays some of its sections even if they are in effect empty.If you use the multilangual functionality, the Joomla! contact module displays all articles with a language code of "*" in addiction to those authored by the contact. We have also added the intro text of the article to the simple title displayed by default.

com_newsfeed: the Joomla! news feed component displays a navigation div even if the page does not need any navigation (and the div is therefore empty).

com_content: the Joomla! content component displays a navigation div even if the page does not need any navigation (and the div is therefore empty).The component has also been modified to allow the correct vertical ordering of articles and the Read more accordion effect in Blog pages.

com_search: the Joomla! search component displays a navigation div even if the page does not need any navigation (and the div is therefore empty).

mod_breadcrumbs: the Joomla! breadcrumb module has a problem with multilangual sites: in some cases the home page can be clicked even if it is the only one in the path.

mod_languages: the Joomla! language module has been modified to offer the possibility to use the Google automated translation on top of the languages available in the site.

If you want to know more about PXM_Desktop or what I'm doing to try to get back to life after the hell to which I have condemned from the lies of Rebecca McKay White (and hers physicians accomplices) and the cover-ups and complicity of the Ventura District Attorney and Police visit my contact page.